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Is Traffic Congestion Growing Three Times As Fast As Economy?
cartechboy writes "Math watch time: For many traffic analysts, INRIX is considered the gold-standard. This week the company says traffic congestion surged in 2013 and grew over three times as fast as the American economy. The bad news: If true, this reverses two consecutive years of traffic declines with a six percent increase in 2013. (GDP, by comparison, grew 1.9 percent last year.) The analysts then theorize links between economic growth and traffic congestion, which makes sense on the surface. (As the economy improves, more jobs are created, so more commuters on the roads) But INRIX's theory creates as many questions as it answers. For example, the U.S. GDP has been steadily growing since 2009. So why did congestion decline in 2011 and 2012?"
So why did congestion decline in 2011 and 2012?
The false equivalence between GDP and labor (and therefore commuting.)
We're shedding workers. The labor participation rate is declining. GDP, like inflation, the unemployment rate, cost-of-living, etc. are political fictions derived from politically derived formulae.
Like the movie? Or Internet traffic? Or vehicular traffic?
Thanks for the context in the summary, douchemonger.
companies are starting to get smart and letting their employees work from home.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
If all that money didn't increase total employment, then GDP could go up while the same number of people stayed home out of work.
The increase in congestion is actually a good sign. It suggests that the employment situation might finally be improving.
layoffs in good jobs where you had to go in during rush hours. night managers at the Burger Doodle, not so much.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The article keeps trying to compare GDP with employment. GDP has been increasing but yet unemployment is stuck at about 7%.
Why is that?
Because the "recovery" is not happening to the average guy. We are seeing a gutting of the middle class, more folks are getting (sometimes multiple) lesser jobs, and yet, companies profits are at record levels.
And in the meantime, the uultra-rich are getting ever more richer and scolding us peons that "we could be in India!" so shut the fuck up!
Income and capital gains taxes at 1950s level is what we need.
as the economy has come back, people have been forced to take jobs further from their homes - wherever they can get one.
with the housing market a mess, they also couldn't easily move closer to work.
when they can sell their houses, and move closer, or there are more jobs closer, we will see an adjustment.
personally, i want to see traffic hell. enough that we bring back light rail as a priority.
its stupid that we do not have lines running down the center of most highways in the country.
comment directly in my journal
The great recession of 2009 became the justification of many companies to lay off workers despite healthy revenue and increasing profits. While this may contribute to the GDP, it doesn't do much for employment.
But INRIX's theory creates as many questions as it answers. For example, the U.S. GDP has been steadily growing since 2009. So why did congestion decline in 2011 and 2012?"
I know in my area, transit has become decidedly less desirable in the past year or so as it's become more crowded. A few years ago I could almost always get a seat and commute in relative comfort. Now the trains are so full that some days it skips my stop (or even if it stops to let someone off, there's not enough room to squeeze on). Biking is an option for me, so I've been biking regularly, but if that wasn't an option, I'd probably drive rather than take an unreliable train that's uncomfortably full. Equipment purchases are large capital expenses that can take years or evena decade to plan, fund, and complete, so public transit lags demand.
According to INRIX, traffic in the U.S. reversed two consecutive years of declines with a six percent increase in 2013. The country's GDP, by comparison, grew 1.9 percent last year. INRIX suggests that continued economic growth will result in more traffic congestion, longer commutes, and more productivity losses.
INRIX is getting their conclusion from one data point: last year. Even though previous years do not support their conclusion, multiple data points. As a result, their conclusion that traffic increases at 3 times GDP growth is not convincing. They need to put a lot more effort into this study. Even the article author pointed that out,
Bottom line: roadways are complex ecosystems, and congestion results from jobs, commuters, road work, mass transit, and countless other factors. While it's encouraging to see traffic jams as symbolic of economic growth, that's not an accurate or complete picture.
In a complex environment like this, data needs a control point and a link from cause to effect. All I see here is a very loose correlation in one year of data. Hence, this is FUD.
Actually... remember his "Shovel Ready projects"? How much you want to bet road construction is up this year due to those stimulus programs? I know the main clover leaf near me is getting torn up this year due to stimulus so at least that bit is Obamas fault. :-)
Ok, what do I win?
If you look at places like San Francisco and the way wealth is pooling there, it's easy to understand why traffic congestion is growing faster than the economy.
If you put a bunch of rich-ass people together in one highly-concentrated place, even if all of them are working from home or taking Google busses to work, they're going to need services. Grocery stores, plumbers, babysitters, teachers, restaurant workers, you name it. Many of those sorts of jobs are not ones which are compatible with telecommuting--if my garbage man starts working from home, I'm going to be pissed!--and most of them are not of an income level which would allow a comfortable residence within the city where the job is. If you're making $30,000 a year as a teacher, spending $2,000 a month on a 400 sq ft studio apartment so you can walk or bike to work doesn't leave much left over for food and the like.
So inevitably, thousands upon thousands of workers need to commute various distances to keep their jobs and live in some level of comfort.
I realize that SF, as a peninsula, is a fairly unique scenario: it provides a high-value destination with severely constrained access points. Maybe not the actual logical conclusion of all similar circumstances, but a useful indicator of how things might play out in areas where money is aggregated into smaller and smaller groups who then take over relatively small and very desirable locations.
The CB App. What's your 20?
We've equated job creation to economic growth. Not all jobs generate the same economic growth. The discrepancy mentioned in the article is a result of more people going to work to less productive jobs. This is a result of economic policies from republicans and democrats, but creating jobs is one of the reasons Obama was elected as president. Unfortunately that is only one side of the equation. The economy is a complicated system and any statement that overly simplifies it to create jobs and the economy will grow should be called into question.
Politician are to blame on both sides of the isle, but we elected them, so we have only ourselves to blame.
See, people are too stupid to realize a bus with 60 people that gets defunded means there are now 60 more cars crammed onto the same failed underfunded highway infrastructure.
A 5 percent reduction in transit funding results in a 30 percent increase in traffic congestion and a 25-50 percent increase in commute times.
Penny-wise.
Pound-foolish.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Not sure if you are serious or if you were making a toungue in cheek joke. What the GP was referring to was that 2012 was a presidential election year and so he is making a thinly veiled attack on the Obama administration, alledging that they changed the GDP number to make themselves look better. Never mind that yearly GDP numbers don't come out until well after the election which happens in November, and also ignore the fact that they couldn't be bothered to put their name on their bullshit accusation. Just another AC troll. Every day I start to wonder more and more about how many people on this site are paid just to muddy the waters to make sure we argue with eachother over "team red" vs "team blue" instead of looking at the 1% who are fucking us over and using bullshit like this to make sure we are too busy arguing with eachother to notice.
-AndrewBuck
I think that we need Christie to do a "traffic study" to sort this out once and for all.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The federal government has been spending ever more money in order to prop up the GDP (remember that gov't spending is part of the GDP). In reality, the economy has been shrinking for some time except in Washington DC. And, no, we can't continue this forever or even much longer.
Do you have ESP?
Of all the economic statistics, the unemployment rate is the easiest to understand. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls or visit a randomly selected sample of Americans, ask them if they are employed, and if they are not, are they looking for a job. While they ask some other questions, those are the basic ones used to determine the widely-publicized unemployment rate. This is not a complicated statistical formula here, subject to all sorts of evil manipulation.
Now, you could argue that the labor participation rate is more useful, or perhaps include people that aren't working as many hours as they'd like, or include people that would like to work, but have given up looking. And they publish those numbers also for any that care to read them, so you can hardly argue that they are a big secret that The Man is trying to hide from you. But it's silly to call any of them "fictitious." And these formulas hardly seem "politically derived." (In fact, the BLS and their counterparts in the GAO are quite fiercely independent; the statisticians are all civil servants that don't really give a *bleep!* what congress or the president want the numbers to end up at.)
Inflation is much the same way; they publish numbers that are perhaps not as useful as we'd like them to be, but they have proven to be pretty free of political whims. It's a drawn-out, very public, process to fiddle with those formulas. If there was a hint that they were bowing to political pressure when calculating them, you'd know about it.
Agree, but I think part of the problem is that we're stuck on jobs as the means to obtain basic income.
If you have a strong economic base, then you shouldn't really need jobs. Just tax the economic activity, and distribute the money to the population (either directly, or in the form of services/subsidies/etc). Of course there will still be jobs as well, but not everybody will need one.
Paying to employ people who aren't actually necessary to the economy is just creating busywork and is wasteful. It would be more productive to just pay them to stay home, and let companies focus on whatever it is that they excel at.
The problem is that we're stuck on an economic system that is based on the need for human labor, and that need has been declining (or to the extent that it is needed, it is only able to be performed by fairly few people).
Fair enough but you forgot to mention that one party has been strongly against spending money on public infrastructure and doubly so while Obama is in office. While building new roads and improving public transportation is only a delaying action for congestion it does at least delay it.
I'm sad to see that I'm the only one that thinks that congestion has gotten worse due to the abundantly clear lack of thought in traffic engineering. I think there might be two scenarios that potentially account for this: 1) I learned about the idea of planning less capacity than is required to "force people's hands" on using public transit. Idealistically, it sounds great. Like most idealistic plans, the real world doesn't work that way and it just pisses people off and, viola, traffic congestion. 2) I don't feel like traffic engineering is keeping-up with our technology. At least in my area (and in many to which I travel), I see no efforts being made to use the technology we have to better improve traffic. Instead of having connected, intercommunicating and load-sensing intersections, we still have a lot of unconnected, unaware intersections that induce a lot of the congestion problems.
Education and research is productive busy work.
You would rather have some eureka moments such as penicillin coming out of useless studies such as an empirical study of why sandwiches grow mould, than a person without goals.
Staying at home bored encourages miscreant self entitled people. Have a look at the book "Generation F" and look at what's happened in England with third generation unemployed living on welfare.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Education and research is productive busy work.
You would rather have some eureka moments such as penicillin coming out of useless studies such as an empirical study of why sandwiches grow mould, than a person without goals.
I agree, and so is stuff like maintaining basic infrastructure (doesn't take much skill to fill in potholes, and yet they're EVERYWHERE around where I live right now).
The problem with research is that many simply aren't cut out for it. Anybody can do one task on an assembly line (which is why the assembly line was invented). Most people just don't care enough about science to make real contributions in research/etc.
Private Cars is just about the most stupid thing in these times. Germans spend 4.7 Billion man hours per year in traffic jams. Mind you, this is Germany, where there are better and more roads per capita, far less speed limits and people actually know how to drive. 4.7 fucking billion man hours per year. Let that sink in for a minute. And that's like 80% of the monetary income generating population wasting that sort of time (I won't say working population, for obvious reasons).
With that time wasted, we could send every person in the workincome population on a paid 3 week vacation each year and still have money to spare.
Cars are an anomally, only around today for mostly historical reasons, with no sensible reason at all. Sort of like the PC keyboard or MS Windows. Only with far more negative impact on overall quality of living and the environment.
Most populations and societies would be better of if we banned private cars alltogether and switched to e-bikes and public transport entirely. With taxis and cargo taxis for the special occasions. Would be cheaper for all, faster for all, better for the environment and we'd all be happier for it. I'd bet money on that.
If I were a billionaire I'd pay some bankrupt German cities to ban cars alltogether and then heavyly invest in them and then sit back and watch the local economy and quality of living skyrocket.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca